WHO KNOWS – THE MAKING OF A ROCK MOVIE by Tony Klinger

Who fans that take an interest in such matters may have read elsewhere that certain issues clouded the production of The Kids Are Alright, the documentary film on the group that was released to cinemas and on video in 1979. With impeccable timing but perhaps inadvertently, this well-received biopic served as a tribute to drummer Keith Moon whose death the previous year brought closure to what many look upon as The Who’s classic period. These issues are hinted at in the introduction to this book which suggests, heaven forbid, that raised voices could be heard at TKAA-related meetings in the offices of Trinifold, The Who’s Soho-based management company, and one of them, heaven forbid, may have belonged to Bill Curbishley, the group’s manager, not a man to react kindly to anything that affronts his pro-active, protective and occasionally combative nature. Another raised voice was no doubt that of Tony Klinger, the author of this book, the much put-upon film-maker brought in by Curbishley and The Who to help make their movie. 

        Disagreements between all those involved in TKAA take centre stage in a rather unsettling but nevertheless insightful book. On the DVD and video I own, Klinger is credited as TKAA’s producer, as is Curbishley, and was therefore privy to everything that went down before and during its creation. Luckily for us, he didn’t sign an NDA, so he chose to bare his soul, initially in a book titled, for some absurd reason, Twilight Of The Gods, published in 2009, republished as The Who And I in 2017. This is the third edition of the same book, much revised, published now by the author, the implication being that for the first time here is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, some of which may have been withheld from earlier editions.* 

        Klinger is an experienced film-maker whose credits go back to working on the original Avengers TV series and several excellent movies, among them Get Carter, an all-time favourite of mine. His first brush with The Who came in late 1976 when he was commissioned to produce a promotional video for Roger Daltrey’s solo single ‘One Of The Boys’, which brought him to the attention of Curbishley who was seeking someone to produce and/or direct the documentary on The Who that became TKAA. To his misfortune, Klinger’s arrival in Who central in early 1977 coincided with a period of unrest and uncertainty surrounding the group. Having toured prodigiously during 1975 and ’76, they were now idle, collectively at least, with no immediate plans for the future. Pete Townshend had begun to compose songs that would appear on Who Are You, which wouldn’t be released until 1978, Daltrey was keen to pursue a career as an actor, John Entwistle was moodily weighing up his options and Moon was living in California, adrift in an ocean of alcohol. On behalf of the group, Curbishley had just completed the purchase of Shepperton film studios south west of London, his intention to broaden The Who’s interest in films and utilise them as a storage and rehearsal space.                                                                                                                                                      Klinger’s first move was to bring in his film-maker friend Sydney Rose to assist with production. This didn’t sit well with Curbishley, which might explain why Rose’s Christian name is misspelt with an i in the credits, a rather shabby slight. Curbishley drew Klinger’s attention to Jeff Stein, an American Who fan who’d already researched archive film footage of the band for no other reason than his enthusiasm for and love of The Who. Stein’s photographs of the group, along with those by his collaborator Chris Johnson, appeared in a delightful photo-study they published 1973, to my knowledge only the second ever Who book (which I treasure), and this no doubt helped him establish his friendly rapport with Townshend. Stein demanded that his friend Ed Rothkowitz be appointed TKAA’s editor, which didn’t sit well with Klinger. And herein lies the problem: too many cooks, each with their own agenda and unwilling or unable to communicate openly with one another, spoiling the broth.

        In the end, of course, the broth turned out to be very tasty indeed but not before Klinger experienced the stuff of nightmares in his dealings with the band, Curbishley and Stein, all of whom seemed at times to be operating at cross purposes. In a nutshell, having found himself more or less at odds with everyone over staffing, budgeting and how the film should look, Klinger believed, perhaps justifiably in light of his greater experience in film-making, that he was right and they were wrong, so he screamed and shouted and, eventually, walked. Only at the very end was he brought back into the fold and then under a cloud that lingers to this day. 

        Along the way, we get heaps of fly-on-the-wall reports of ‘difficult’ meetings, in which Curbishley comes across as a bit of a bully, and finely drawn but far from flattering pen portraits of Townshend, Daltrey, Entwistle and Moon; respectively duplicitous, hot-headed, broody and nuts. We visit Malibu where Klinger and his men get a full-on dose of Moon at his most obdurate, alternately blind drunk or rabidly libidinous with girls galore, clearly not long for this world, and a cameo appearance by his next door neighbours, tough guy actor Steve McQueen and wife Ali MacGraw. We visit Stow-on-the-Wold where a sulky Entwistle is also uncooperative – “Extracting conversation from him was like drawing teeth” – and Burwash on the Kent-Sussex border where Daltrey occupies the local manor house but declines to be filmed with his private helicopter lest it damage his working-man-made-good image. 

        Despite its tongue-in-cheek cover – the author sat on paving stones, draped in a Union Jack in emulation of the Who photo used to promote TKAA, its sub-title set in the same typeface – I found the book’s brutal honesty enlightening but a bit depressing. Much as Klinger strongly admires the Who’s music and the power they radiate on stage, he feels they let him down. “We needed one hundred percent of The Who’s artistic involvement and moral commitment, not purely monetary support; I never felt we had it,” he writes towards the end of his book. “If Pete wanted to go for something, Roger would be pulling in the other direction and the opposite held true. … the band’s commitment to each other, let alone the film, was stretched paper-thin… [they] didn’t know what came next either, nor did their management, lawyers or record company. It had evolved in a way that none of us could have desired or foreseen except in our darkest nightmares.” 

        Biographical details of The Who throughout are sketchy and not always 100% accurate, and the author’s jaundiced opinions on the members of The Who are, of course, coloured by his own regrettable experiences. To a certain extent I know what he’s getting at – I too have experienced The Who at close quarters and had business dealings with them** – but I can’t help but think that at times he’s overegging the pudding. Nevertheless, the book’s original publisher showed the manuscript to them and “got the all clear”, according to the author. If so, it speaks wonders for The Who’s lifelong commitment to letting it all hang out, as evidenced in so many other Who-related books. 

        Who Knows – The Making Of A Rock Movie is illustrated with photographs by Danny Clifford, many taken during the production of TKAA, has 250 pages, no index and costs £14.99 on Amazon. 

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* I can neither confirm nor refute this as I am unfamiliar with the two previous editions.

** I found Pete, Roger and John strangely indifferent to the project when I worked with them on the 1994 4-CD box set 30 Years Of Maximum R&B and several subsequent upgraded CDs. Bill Curbishley, on the other hand, was always helpful and as keen as mustard, and no client has ever paid me more generously or promptly than Bill did for these records. 

ZZ TOP IN NEW YORK’S CENTRAL PARK, July 1974

In the summer months in New York I was once a regular visitor to the Wolman Ice Skating rink in Central Park, not to skate as ice froze only in winter, but to see rock shows at the Schaefer Music Festival, a series of open-air concerts held there during June, July and August. Long before Eliminator cemented their image and reputation as razor-sharp, synthesiser-enhanced, video-friendly purveyors of infectious, fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek boogie, 50 years ago this week I was there to watch ZZ Top for the first time. 

They were an unknown quantity in the UK in 1974, and it wasn’t until a year later that I decided they were worthy of a Melody Maker feature and interviewed guitarist Billy Gibbons. Oddly, as I point out in the review below, they built up a huge following in their home state of Texas before venturing further afield, so much so that they could attract huge crowds in Houston and Dallas but the ice rink in Central Park, which held about 6,000, was only half full. It was the same with Bob Seger, for years a big draw in Detroit but largely unknown elsewhere in the US until ‘Night Moves’ was a hit in 1976. 

It’s highly likely that this was the first ever mention of ZZ Top in the UK music press and for the benefit of our readers I felt it necessary to point out in my review, reproduced verbatim below from MM’s Caught In The Act page, dated July 20, 1974, that ZZ Top was pronounced Zee Zee Top and not Zed Zed Top! 

Such is the size of the North American continent that it’s possible for a band to be idolised in one part of the States but relatively unknown in another. Many acts, both English and American, are well aware of this and plan their tours accordingly, making sure to book the big halls in their best areas and lying low elsewhere. 

ZZ Top (pronounced Zee Zee) are a classic example of this peculiar trait. They come from Texas and down there they can pull in thousands of fans with no trouble. With the possible exception of the Allman Brothers, Zee Zee are the hottest act in the south.

But in New York, Zee Zee are pretty much newcomers to the circuit. Their album Tres Hombres is shooting up the Top 30 and that’s based almost entirely on southern sales. If the great North East conurbations catch on as well, it could be number one in days.

Zee Zee are a powerhouse trio, fronted by a lanky cowpoke called Billy Gibbons who wears a low slung Les Paul, very tight jeans and ten gallon hat, and likes to boogie a lot. Sharing the vocal work with him is a chubby blond bassist with matted beard called Dusty Hill who also wears a big hat, and a skinny bespectacled drummer called Frank Beard who looks rather too fragile to be in among dudes like Zee Zee. 

Basically, they’re a hot boogie band with nothing particularly unusual to offer other than a never-ending supply of energy and riffs to whip up excitement and keep it at a peak for an hour and a half. They’re another case of providing their fans with what they want, simple and without frills.

Last week they played in New York’s Central Park in another of the Schaeffer series of concerts and drew a half-capacity audience on a sultry, hot evening when it was an effort to walk, let alone dance to rock and roll. Below St Louis, of course, they’d have packed in a capacity crowd.

The set took a while to warm up after a somewhat unsympathetic audience had given openers Brownsville Station a less than enthusiastic reception, but Zee Zee reacted strongly to the challenge and basted forth with all the energy of a rocket launch. 

There’s nothing too original about their music and neither did any particular break stand out. Their forte is an unqualified ability to get it on with no messing around at attempts to display individual instrumental ability. Thus, we have Gibbons and Hill, standing side by side, rocking up and down in a timed sequence with all the fury of a pair of Texan stallions.

They won the battle, played three encores which included a medley of 12-bar rockers from the ages, and left everyone dripping with sweat, not least themselves. 

TIME HAS COME TODAY by Harold Bronson

For those unfamiliar with Harold Bronson, he’s a dedicated American music lover who caught the bug as a teenager in the 1960s and was never cured, not that he ever wanted to be. Every penny he earned doing chores at the family home was spent at the local record store and when he left college he immersed himself in what he loved, playing in a band, writing record reviews for magazines and, eventually, working at a store called Rhino Records, the name he chose for the much-respected reissue label that he and his partner Richard Foos launched in 1978. By the mid-1980s it was the leading repackaging label in the US, noted not only for its good taste but the care and precision its owners devoted to each and every release. Rhino was eventually bought out by Warner Bros who, it’s safe to say, weren’t quite as conscientious as those from whom they bought it.

This is Harold’s third book, following on from his Rhino Records Story (2013) and My British Invasion (2017), whose subtitle might well have been Confessions Of An Anglophile. It differs from those in that its format is a series of diary entries, utterly candid and without pretension or hindsight. What we read in this laconic, day-to-day style is precisely what happened and when, recollected in a very matter of fact fashion, complete with forthright impressions of those he met and casual observations on personal traits. As such, it’s very enlightening, a snapshot of how operators like Harold do their business, the characters they meet, among them several noted rock and pop stars, and what’s said at the meetings. It’s also very moreish in that once you start reading you want to keep reading, not that the structure of the book makes it a page-turner, more that items of interest keep jumping off the page, some amusing, some edifying, and, of course, once you’ve got the hang of the way Harold lays it all down, you can jump in anywhere, pick and choose a few pages without concern for losing a thread, simply because there isn’t one, apart from the sense of being a fly-on-the-wall eavesdropper to an interesting life in music. 

Let’s take a few examples. Among the many acts with whom Harold became close was the Monkees, several of whose LPs were reissued by Rhino. Harold met Michael Nesmith for the first time on Monday, June 1, 1970, at the offices of his music publisher, Screen Gems, on Sunset Boulevard, interviewing him for an unnamed magazine. “Mike was smart, thoughtful and surprisingly candid, especially when I asked him why he hadn’t formed a band with Peter Tork after they left the Monkees,” writes Harold. “Mike and Peter were considered the serious musicians of the four Monkees. His response was unsettling: ‘I don’t like Peter Tork, never have liked him. I have to qualify that, because me not liking somebody doesn’t mean that they’re particularly bad people. He could do a lot of wonderful things for me. The first visceral gut reaction to Peter was one of dislike. I never have liked him. I don’t want to play in a band with Peter. I didn’t want to play in a band with Peter. And I didn’t like playing in a band with Peter.’ To provide perspective, he also said, ‘I don’t like my mother. She happens to be an awfully nice lady and has never done anything to me to make me not like her’.”

Six year later Harold met Davy Jones: “Davy was serious throughout the interview, focused on financial matters even though I didn’t ask about that…. He said he was fine with the money [the group] made from royalties on the records but believed Screen Gems had cheated the group on the merchandising. ‘Our contract said we were supposed to split five percent. All we got were checks for $3,000 apiece. We sued them for $20 million, but eventually settled for $50,000.’ It left a bad taste in Davy’s mouth: ‘I will never sue anybody as long as I live. It’s heartache, it’s boring and it’s unfriendly. If anybody crosses me up now, I’ll cut their balls off and stick them in their mouth. Nobody will ever fuck me again, that’s for sure.’ Afterward, Davy and I walked to our cars parked on a side street. I was disconcerted to discover that, even though he had made over a million dollars as a Monkee, five years after the group dissolved he was driving a battered yellow Volkswagen Bug.”

Here’s an entry for Tuesday, June 12, 1990: “Earlier this year, I wrote to Apple Records head Neil Aspinall, offering an advance (against royalties) of $500,000 to license the U.S. rights to Apple’s non-Beatles masters. Despite the hefty amount, I received no reply. As it’s likely Apple will someday issue a Best of Badfinger, I wanted to compile their post-Apple masters. The Best of Badfinger Volume II, released today, took over two years from when I initiated the project. Even before the group’s fourth and final album for Apple was released in November 1973, the label was falling apart, and interest in Badfinger had diminished. They had made money for Apple and were still capable of making good records. Bill Collins, their aged and overwhelmed dance band manager, had brought in a sharpie to handle their affairs. Stan Polley, their new co-manager, made a good deal with Warner Bros. Records. He negotiated an advance of $225,000 per album, which meant there was much more for him when he absconded with the funds.” 

Another artist that Harold befriended was Peter Noone, aka Herman of Herman’s Hermits. The book recounts many meetings between them including this one on Wednesday, November 30, 2005: “I met Peter Noone for lunch at Trilussa in Beverly Hills. We don’t usually reminisce about the old days when we get together, but today we did. I had read somewhere that he coined the term ‘groupies.’ I was surprised, because he didn’t seem the promiscuous type. He explained he was late to the concept that young women wanted to have sex with him (for whatever reason: status, bragging rights, glamor). Peter: ‘We were Roman Catholic boys, we were moral, we didn’t steal, we were nice guys. Most guys kept score of how many girls they’d had, but I didn’t, because I was looking for Miss Right. I only dated one girl at a time. It wasn’t until I was 20 that I realized they all weren’t in love with me. I phoned a girlfriend in New York, and she had Jimi Hendrix over.”

On Tuesday, October 22, 1996, Harold attended a Who concert at the LA Forum with his friend Martin Lewis: “Martin and I went backstage after the show. Martin and Pete [Townshend] are old friends; I had met Pete only briefly, but we had exchanged letters regarding possible Rhino projects. In his response to one of my lesser ideas, he accused me of attempting to ‘exploit the jackdaw mentality of US record collectors.’ (I had to look up the unfamiliar term: it means ‘hoarder.’) I chatted briefly with Pete but didn’t want to intrude on Martin and Pete’s social time. The Who’s manager, Bill Curbishley, was friendly and introduced me to John Entwistle, reminding him that Rhino had issued a compilation of his solo work. I told him I was a fan, but he didn’t seem interested. As he drifted away, Bill explained that John is hard of hearing and only interested in meeting women.” 

Rhino issued the LP recorded by The Rutles, the Beatle-spoof band masterminded as a Monty Python spin-off by Eric Idle and former Bonzo Dog Neil Innes, with whom he breakfasted on Saturday, September 10, 1994, at the Sunset Marquis Hotel where other Pythons were staying during a promotional blitz in LA: “Neil’s been friends with George Harrison since 1967. (George has a cameo in The Rutles.) Because Neil’s wife was George’s landscape and garden designer, he could have become a closer member of George’s inner circle of friends, but Neil respected his wife’s professional relationship and didn’t push it. On one occasion, he and Eric Idle visited George when Ringo was there. George and Ringo spontaneously sang the Rutles’ ‘Ouch!’ Carol Cleveland stopped by our table to say hello; Neil introduced me. She appeared in most Python productions, usually as the blond sexpot. Now, she’s a much more mature 52.”

Finally, how about this one from Friday May 10, 1974: “I was among 250 guests at a launch party for Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song Records at Hotel Bel-Air. Michele Phillips, Bill Wyman, Bryan Ferry, Dr. John, Billy Preston, Lloyd Bridges, Micky Dolenz and members of ELO were among the celebrity guests. I introduced myself to Jimmy Page, who was dressed smartly in a black blazer and shirt, his avalanche of wavy hair recalling Tiny Tim’s… Heidi, my date, had a meltdown. It sometimes happens when she smokes pot; she becomes paranoid. I escorted her to my car and sat with her trying to calm her down. Here I was, at a fancy Led Zeppelin party, and I had to deal with her poor judgment. I dreaded having to leave. After a while, she calmed down and we returned to savor a dinner of Beef Wellington and Lobster Quenelles Americaine. I would have liked to meet Groucho Marx, but I stayed away because I heard he was cranky. The 84-year-old probably didn’t know why he was with such an unfamiliar crowd. Maggie Bell, the first artist signed to Swan Song, introduced herself to Groucho, telling him what an honor it is to meet him. He responded, ‘Fuck that, show us your tits!’”

That’s just a tiny fraction of the contents of Time Has Come Today – titled after a Chambers Brothers’ song by the way – which is published by Trouser Press Books. It costs £20, give or take a pound or two depending on the supplier, has 435 pages, a useful index and is illustrated with judiciously chosen photographs of the author with some of the people he writes about. 

WHO'S THAT GIRL? Melody Maker 50 Years Ago This Week

Fifty years ago this week I wrote my first piece for Melody Maker on the bands that played in downtown New York, in places like CBGBs and Club 82. The photographer Bob Gruen was my guide and in Club 82 he introduced me to a beautiful girl called Debbie, one of three singers with a group called The Stilettos. 

I visited both CBGBs and Club 82 several times before I wrote the piece and it mentions many acts, the Stilettos among them. I now realise that this was the first ever mention of Debbie Harry in a British newspaper, music or otherwise, and Chris Stein graciously confirms this is in his recent memoir Under A Rock. A Bob Gruen photo accompanied the piece and when I got my hands on a copy I called Debbie at the beauty salon where she worked in those days and we arranged to meet so I could give her that issue of MM. She was very excited to have her picture in a paper, any paper, for the first time. I found the picture below, which was probably taken by Bob, on the internet and if my memory serves me correctly, this is the dress she was wearing on the night I first saw her, so the chances are it was taken that night.

This is the unedited piece I wrote for MM, issue dated July 6, 1974. 

“HEY MAN, what’s happening?” The inevitable hip American greeting is accompanied with “gimme five” (an invitation to shake hands) and responded to with: “Hey man, what’s happening with you?”

    The cynics who say that nothing’s happening in New York today are very wrong. There are dozens of immature young bands playing in scruffy late night places in Greenwich Village and the Bowery every evening, creating a similar atmosphere to that which existed in London in the early sixties.

    Excitement, sweat, crude and simple music and a “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude mingle together in this new generation of bands.

    Cynics dismiss them as trash. They will point out, quite correctly, that they’re not as good as so-and-so who can fill Madison Square Garden, but it’s a lame attitude. Rock must always look towards the future.

    In these seedy clubs inhabited by barely competent musicians lies that future. Somewhere, in among them, is the next generation equivalent of The Rolling Stones or The Who.

    In the same way that the Stones and The Who began their careers as brash and exciting clashes with the accepted music business establishment, so these New York bands clash with their superiors in rock. Through the passage of time the Stones and the Who and countless others have become the establishment they once clashed with so fiercely: the new young bands are railing against this establishment in the same way.

    While record companies promote their newly signed artists with expensive parties for press and radio jocks at established clubs, the new bands just play for the kids. They might not be very good technically but then so were all of today’s rock giants in their formative years. A parallel could easily be drawn between London’s pub rock and these brash new Manhattan bands and their shameless punk rock, overtones of bisexuality and happy untogetherness.

    Two similarities stand out immediately: both types of bands are young musicians from a different generation than the accepted heavies and their followers, and in both cases many of the groups have yet to sign record contracts if, indeed, they will ever be offered one.

    Both types are doing it for love.

    But here the lines draw apart. In the case of the British pub rockers, it seems to be a desire on their part to return to basics, to pull away from the accepted course that rock has taken over the past five years (all original numbers, masses of equipment, blistering guitar solos demonstrating the instrumental ability of the lead guitarist) and simply display general good taste in repertoire culled from the last ten years.

    The music is all important and the band takes second place.

    With the New Yorkers the opposite occurs. The effect is paramount to the music. Shock and outrage is the name of the game: the more freakish, the more outlandish the fetishes of the personnel and the more bizarre their clothes the better. It’s not much more than grabbing a guitar, learning a few chords, applying lipstick, and bingo!

    In general, the music is pretty duff, crash bang repeated riffs coupled with an amateurishness that smacks of taking the plunge before they’re ready. They seem to thrive on tuneless singing and have little concept of sound balance. Good PA systems are probably out of their financial reach, anyway.

    Nevertheless, these misgivings are lost in the atmosphere they create from a mixed bag of influences from rock over the past eight years. They’ve taken ideas from the Stones’ lawlessness, the Who’s punk, Bowie’s bisexuality and Zeppelin’s riffs.

    Who are they? Starting at the top we have the New York Dolls, who are no newcomers nowadays. Regardless of musical merit, they cannot be accused of jumping on the bandwagon as they set it rolling in the first place.

    The Dolls are really outside the confines of underground New York by now: they’ve released a couple of albums and toured on a countrywide basis. They’ve even been over to England.

    In the wake of the Dolls are scores more, too numerous to mention and chances are I’m missing some here and now. In no particular order we have Teenage Lust, the Fast, Jet Black, Television, the Stilettos, the Miamis, Palace, the Harlots of 42nd St., Star Theatre, Wayne County, Another Pretty Face and the Brats. At the time of writing some may be splitting, some may no longer exist and personnel from two or more may have formed a new band.

    They play at places like the 82 Club (far and away the most popular), the Coventry in Queens, CBGBs in the Bowery, Upstairs at Max’s (occasionally) and the Mushroom in the Village. Without exception, they’re seedy low-spots in a city that has managed to encompass the best of the best and the worst of the worst.

    ‘Phone up the 82 Club any time of the day or night and you receive a recorded message: “Dance, dance, dance,” says an oldish-sounding man. “Dance the night away. This is where the Stars hang out. David Bowie, John Lennon. Free roast buffet on Sundays and live music every Wednesday. This Wednesday...”

    Almost all of the above bands have played the 82 Club and even if they haven’t, the musicians who comprise them can be found down there. I’ve seen Bowie there once, and Lennon reportedly once paid a ten minute visit but left after being surrounded by kids.

    It costs anything between two and five dollars to get inside, depending on the night of the week or whether there’s a band. It’s more like an English discotheque than a club, but the premises (and name) have a long history. From the 1940s up to the end of the sixties it was one of New York’s most glamorous drag theatres.

    Female impersonators, transvestites and their ilk made the 82 their home, and even today the element of bi-sexuality runs strong. On the door and behind the bar are some of New York’s more celebrated butch women.

    But back to the bands. They play on Wednesdays and generally pack the place. Never had I seen the 82 more crowded than about three weeks back when Wayne County topped the bill over the Stilettos. Wayne came out in full drag which was pretty stunning, but the music was overly loud and under inspired for my tastes. He went down a bomb though.

    The Stilettos, who opened up, had more potential but less rehearsal. Fronted by a cuddly platinum blonde called Debbi [sic], they’re a girl vocal trio with a male guitar/bass/drums back-up band.

    The three chicks take turns to sing solo while the other two chant away behind, and some of the songs were well worth putting on vinyl. Ninety-five per cent were original, but the style was taken from the late ‘fifties era of vocal groups.

    In the same vein, but slicker and with an added male singer, are Teenage Lust who’ve been going the rounds for over two years now. Again there’s three girls aptly titled the Lustettes who are the focal point of the group. The girls have carefully choreographed routines which they stick to with rigid discipline.

    Their singer wears a white tail suit and white topper, and jumps around a lot, easing himself from the stage on to any piece of furniture available that will stand his weight. They were loud and visually exciting, but I felt the material let them down, especially when the girls weren’t on stage.

    Television are another whose expertise is overshadowed by their enthusiasm: I saw them a few months back when they were woefully under-rehearsed and little more than a joke. Last weekend at CBGBs (far less populated than the 82), they did better.

    They’re crude but young and the bass player needs a crash course in fundamentals before they’ll get any better. The second time I saw them they reminded me of The Searchers with their unison vocal work and ringing, trebly guitars. Again, they did all original material.

    Another Pretty Face are a five piece band who don’t rely entirely on their own material, but pick intelligently from British material which never caught on in America. They plunder savagely from Roxy Music and T. Rex and put over excellent cover versions.

    Though their initial impact is with the gay rock liberation movement, and the singer imitates David Bowie depressingly well, there’s talent beneath the make-up that’s gotta show through sooner or later. I think it will. Star Theatre actually drove me out of CBGBs the other night when I’d gone along to catch the Stilettos for a second time. They feature Eric “Love” Emerson on vocals, a one-time protégé of Andy Warhol who comes on rather like Arthur Brown, lighting candles and squatting like a Russian folk dancer to sing his songs.

    It was the volume that drove me away rather than the actual show as they’re as tight a band than any around. After the happy untogetherness of the Stilettos it was too much to take: miking up drums in a place no larger than the average living room is surely going too far.

    There are the Miamis who everyone assures me are “better than so and so,” and the Fast are forever filling my letter box with invitations to go and see them. 

WHEN WE WAS FAB – Inside The Beatles Australasian Tour 1964, by Andy Neill & Greg Armstrong

Sixty years ago today, on July 2, 1964, The Beatles arrived home at London Airport – it became Heathrow in 1966 – at 11.10am having flown over 10,000 miles, all the way from Brisbane in Australia via Sydney, Djakarta, Singapore, Cairo and Frankfurt. They left behind them two shell-shocked nations that would never be quite the same whose teenagers had been part of a life-changing experience. “They welcomed us like liberators,” was the headline that Derek Taylor, Brian Epstein's PA and de facto PR on the tour, wrote from Adelaide for George Harrison's ghosted column for the Daily Express in London. “I’ve seen films of de Gaulle re-entering Paris after the recapture of France and the allies marching up Italy. Without wishing to draw comparisons, the expressions on the faces today were similar to the expressions on the faces of people freed from captivity.”

He wasn’t kidding. The Beatles tour of Australia and New Zealand during the second half of June 1964 saw the… “most hysterical scenes of mass adulation neither country had witnessed before, nor have they experienced since,” write Andy Neill and Greg Armstrong in the introduction to their forthcoming, utterly fab, 308-page large format book on the tour. “If the experience the four Beatles were sharing took on a surreal quality as their career skyrocketed, it was to become even more unimaginable when they arrived in Australia.

“None of the fan scenes displayed in Britain or the United States ever came close to the staggering display of affection that greeted the Beatles in Australia, particularly in Adelaide and Melbourne. To the Beatles utter disbelief, it appeared the entire population of these far-flung cities were turning out to catch a glimpse of the young men with ‘strange’ haircuts who played a new kind of pop music. In staid Adelaide fans camped out for 65 hours for concert tickets. When the Beatles arrived there two months later, a staggering 300,000 people lined the streets [to see them].”

The Adelaide Beatles motorcade arrives in King William Street and, below, fans on the street. 

(Photos by Vic Grimmett)

Until now the only available reportage of this extraordinary explosion of Beatlemania has been The Beatles Down Under by Glenn A. Baker, Australia’s foremost writer on pop music, a book I’ve owned for years and which is now quite collectable. It’s very much a fly-on-the-wall account and was fairly eye-opening insofar as when it was published in 1982 it offered hitherto unmentionable details of JPG&R’s off-stage activities that can best described as less than saintly. Much of this is downplayed in When We Was Fab, not least because its authors believe those interviewed by Baker were exaggerating the Beatles’ sybaritic urges for effect. The truth is less scandalous but no less sensational, not least the extent to which the Beatles coped with the madness that surrounded them, and continued virtually uninterrupted for the duration of the visit. 

It’s all here, the chaos, the concerts, the airport scenes, the hotel receptions, the press conferences, the pope-like balcony appearances, the cast and crew, the experience of Jimmie Nicol, drafted in to replace bedridden Ringo at the start, the girls who managed to evade security, the whimsical response to all this mayhem from the Beatles themselves and even the few nay-sayers who threw eggs at them. 

Neill, a New Zealander long based in the UK, and Armstrong, who lives in Melbourne, have spent almost 25 years putting their book together. They have gone to enormous lengths to cover every imaginable detail of this hectic tour, interviewing all those still living that were in any way connected with it, and researching every possible line of inquiry from contemporaneous reports in the Australasian press. It corrects hitherto unreliable accounts and is illustrated with hundreds of pictures, many previously unseen, and scans of relevant documents, press accounts and mementos from the period. It is the definitive account of a major highlight in the early career of the world’s greatest pop group and a key milestone in Australian popular culture.

“As a schoolboy in England, I’d been at the Coronation, standing among crowds of people by the roadside, but this was way beyond anything I’d ever seen,” says David Glyde, saxophone player with Sounds Incorporated who opened for the Beatles on the tour. “When we caught up with the Beatles they were just as incredulous as we were. ‘What’s going on in this place? Where have all these people come from?’”

When We Was Fab is published by Woodslane Press in Australia, and is available in the UK from most book outlets. 

JOHNNY ROGAN - In Remembrance

Yesterday, at St Declan's cemetery in Tramore on the southeast coast of Ireland, I stood in quiet contemplation by the grave of my great friend Johnny Rogan, the music writer who was my role model for almost 40 years.

        Tramore, a pleasant seaside town with a population 11,000, lies 12 kilometres west of Waterford from where Johnny's parents emigrated to London in the 1940s. Johnny owned a small house on a steep hill in the old part of the town, now unoccupied, in which he liked to write, and a few minutes drive away is the home of his former partner Jackie who tends his grave weekly, trimming the grass that grows around the headstone that bears his name. At its base is a line from a poem by Edmund Spencer, whose Faerie Queene was the subject of Johnny's MA dissertation: "Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew." It was chosen by Jackie's uncle Sean who gave the eulogy at Johnny's funeral at the Holy Cross RC Church in Tramore shortly after his death in February of 2021. 

        From beginning to end ours was a master-pupil relationship. Johnny was a literary scholar, university trained, with degrees in English. I left school at 17 with five O-levels and, apart from a two-year course in the tradecraft of journalism at Bradford Tech, picked up all I knew on the job. I had much to learn and in Johnny found the perfect teacher, schooled not only in the art of literacy but in how to adapt this skill to writing and editing books about our shared love, rock'n'roll music. In view of how our futures would pan out, it was the ideal match.  

        We met for the first time in Paddington, December 1982, at a Christmas party thrown by Proteus, a publisher for whom we had both written books, Johnny on Neil Young, me on Pete Townshend. It was held in a nondescript church hall just off Praed Street, close to Proteus' offices, and though I cannot remember who introduced us, I can recall quite clearly that after the introduction we didn't much talk to anyone else at the party, and that when it looked like the free booze was running out we headed to the nearest pub together and carried on talking until closing time. It's quite likely I was a bit sloshed when I headed for home that night, thus establishing from the very start a pattern that would become a key aspect of our friendship.

        Proteus Books went bust a couple of years later and Johnny and I sat next to one another at a creditors' meeting in a hotel on The Aldwych. Both of us were owed money by the company and we took pleasure in watching its managing director, on a podium at the front, squirm as a bankruptcy accountant read out a damning indictment of mismanagement. We were highly amused when the Irish photographer Finn Costello, another creditor, stood up and swore loudly at that MD, calling him a "fucking cunt", as I recall. Many in the room, us amongst them, cheered loudly when Finn upped and left the gathering, his parting words, "I have to leave now. There's a nasty smell in this room and its coming from the podium." Johnny and I liked that kind of thing. 

        Soon after this I became the editor at Omnibus Press and acquired the rights to the first of three books by Johnny that Omnibus would publish. Johnny's title was Wham: The Death of a Supergroup but with his approval we opted to retitle it Wham Confidential which we felt had more immediacy. It was, of course, the story of the duo formed by George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, perhaps not the most obvious subject for an author of Johnny's background, but this was no hagiography aimed at the teenage girls who screamed at George and Andrew, more an investigation into the music industry levers that were pulled to make Wham what they were and the strains that tore them apart. It was only 160 pages, quite short by the standards that Johnny would set in the future, but it was the first indication to me that in him I had found an author of unusual precision who wrote about music and musicians with great clarity and insight. I'd already formed a high opinion of Johnny's skills when I read his Proteus Neil Young book and now, running Omnibus, I was in a position to take full advantage of them.

        Johnny delivered the manuscript for his Wham book in the manner of students submitting a thesis: several sheets of A4 paper typed in double spacing and bound together in a folder with the title and author's name in bold lettering on the front. Although in the 1990s computers would preclude the need for typed manuscripts from which books would be typeset, in 33 years at Omnibus, during which I commissioned and/or edited over 800 rock books, no other author ever delivered his work in such a professional way. 

        The Wham book sold respectably but wasn't what I could call a commercial success. I suppose we should have realised that Wham fans were unlikely to want to read a serious book about them, and those readers who liked serious music books weren't interested in Wham. It slipped between two stools but the lesson we learned, however, was put to good use in Johnny's next book, Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance, which soon became the best-selling book that Omnibus had ever published. It was controversial too, vexing Morrissey who described it as “all lies” and famously commented: “I hope Johnny Rogan ends his days very soon in an M3 pile-up or a hotel fire,” a quote we gleefully included on the cover of future editions. 

        Johnny delivered his manuscript for The Severed Alliance in the same manner as he'd delivered the Wham book, but he was a few weeks late. When it became clear to him that he wouldn't deliver on time he asked for a meeting with me and our sales director Frank Warren. At that meeting he offered to return the advance, producing from his pocket a signed cheque made out to Music Sales for the amount. Frank tore it up. I was astonished. In all those 33 years I helmed Omnibus' editorial department, no other author ever volunteered to return their advance when they were late delivering, as almost all invariably were. This cemented my admiration for Johnny. Not only was he immensely skilled in his chosen field, he was an honourable chap too. 

        It's no exaggeration to say that the success of The Severed Alliance changed the editorial agenda at Omnibus. Before its arrival we had concentrated largely on large format illustrated books with less concern paid to the text but from now on we would gradually publish more and more text-led titles and fewer books dominated by photography. (The only book Omnibus ever published on my watch whose sales matched Johnny's Smiths book was Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon by Tony Fletcher, another author who became, and still is, a close friend. Johnny indexed Tony's book and, as it happened, Tony would write a Smiths book himself, A Light That Never Goes Out. Far from being displeased by the competition, at a lunch I organised for the three of us, Johnny offered to help Tony in any way he could.)

        By this time Johnny and I had become drinking buddies, working hard - we indexed several books together, he and I devised an Omnibus style guide and I often consulted him on editorial issues - and playing hard. We usually caroused around Soho and though most of these pub crawls are lost to memory, I can vividly recall the evening I introduced him to the US music writer Timothy White, another friend of mine now also sadly passed. The three of us wound up in a nightclub owned by David Arden, son of Don, brother of Sharon, whom Johnny had befriended as a result of his investigations into rock band management. The waitresses - I think they were referred to as hostesses in this establishment - were very beautiful and unusually friendly towards us but we were all far too drunk - David kept bringing us free bottles of champagne - to take advantage of the situation.

        Omnibus Press was a big fish in a small pond as far as rock books were concerned, but a small fish in a big pond when it came to publishing at large. As Johnny's reputation grew following the success of his Smiths book, it was inevitable that he would seek out mainstream publishers that could pay far bigger advances than Omnibus could offer. We only did one more book together, on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but whenever I went on holiday Johnny deputised for me, enjoying a spell at my desk, and he invariably attended our quarterly editorial meetings at which decisions were made on which books to publish and which to pass on. He became my staunchest ally.

        When Johnny launched his own publishing company, Rogan House, it was to Omnibus Press and its parent company Music Sales that he turned for marketing, warehousing and distribution, or fulfilment as it is known in the trade. This strengthened our ties and friendship even more. Along the way I had, of course, became aware of Johnny's reputation as a rather mysterious, even remote, figure in the world of rock books, a trait he encouraged as his renown grew. In truth, he was amongst the most sociable men I ever knew and I came to suspect that this was a mischievous ploy on his part, a way of ensuring his privacy while at the same time creating an enigmatic persona that suited his way of life.

        Details of all the many other books that Johnny wrote can be found in the more formal obituary I wrote for the Guardian newspaper, a longer version of which appears on this blog here: https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2021/02/johnny-rogan-1953-2021.html

        Johnny's unexpected and sudden death from a brain haemorrhage came as a great shock to me, as it did to all who knew him, and because it occurred during the Covid travel ban I was unable to attend the funeral in Tramore. I watched the service on my computer by means of a video link up and vowed that when the time was right I'd come to Tramore myself to pay my respects at Johnny's last resting place, as I did yesterday.

        I grew misty eyed as I stood before Johnny's gravestone and felt the need to turn away to face the wind that blew towards me from the sea. I recalled the good times. Then I dried my eyes and my wife Lisa took the photo that appears above. I will miss him always. 

FAWLTY TOWERS - THE PLAY

The old adage that we prefer the familiar was never more apparent to me than last night when I watched the stage production of John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers at the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. The audience, most of whom seemed of an age that first laughed at Basil between 1975 and 1979 when the TV show was originally broadcast, knew what was coming and were primed to laugh at all the right moments: Sybil on the warpath, Basil losing the plot, Mrs Richards’ deafness, Manuel’s shaky grasp of English, the talking moose, ‘Don’t mention the war’ and, most of all, the layer upon layer of confusion and misunderstanding that made Fawlty Towers a superlative farce. And it’s all been recreated to perfection.

        Now much is new, however. This stage production, overseen by Cleese but directed by Caroline Jay Ranger, seamlessly blends together three of the original half-hour sitcoms – The Hotel Inspector, Communication Problems and The Germans – into one 90-minute plus play that here and there has echoes from the other nine episodes in the series. At times there were even hints of Python’s silly walk and, when Basil yells ‘Polly’ at the long-suffering waitress played originally by his wife Connie Booth, I was reminded of Cleese in the pet shop where Michael Palin sold him a dead parrot. 

        Don’t mend anything that isn’t broken seems to have been the production’s prime concern, so the cast are mimics as much as actors. Adam Jackson-Smith is Basil, as ungainly and awkward as Basil/Cleese, a tall, thin man, with long legs who manages to contort himself into pretzels, agonising over a faux-pas, getting the wrong end of the stick and abusing Spanish waiter Manuel and his guests alike. Anna-Jane Casey is just as effective as Sybil, beehive in place, the clothes just right, ditto her shrill accent, especially on the phone to the unseen Audrey – ‘I know’ – or when berating her hapless husband. There were times when I thought Victoria Fox’s Polly really was the young Connie Booth, at least in the way she spoke, and Hemi Yeroham pitched Manuel just right, not quite as dumb as we might think. When he said ‘I know nothing’ the place erupted. The major’s bigoted dialogue has been softened, no doubt to acquiesce with 21st Century PC sensibilities, but he still hasn’t found the wallet that was nicked by ‘the woman he once knew’.

        Although there is a 20-minute interval, the three episodes overlap smoothly and some additional dialogue has been inserted to assist continuity. The action is fast-paced, with lines traded like ricochet fire at moments of high farce and it doesn’t pay to drift off. At the climax the whole house of cards tumbles into a riot of confusion as the fire alarm brings everyone – all the cast, including the two old ladies, the major brandishing a gun and the three hotel inspectors – to the dance, every one of them bewildered, bemused or furious at Fawlty Towers’ wretched proprietor.

        Though I knew almost all the jokes, I still laughed, as did my whole family, not least daughter Olivia visiting this week from the US. I can remember when, aged about 10, she used to watch our Fawlty Towers video box set in our house in London on rotation, memorising the dialogue to the extent that her and a couple of friends from her primary school actually staged an ad-hoc FT play of their own in our house. We shot a video of that and this weekend I’m going to seek it out and watch it again. Whatever weirdness has overtaken John Cleese in recent years, Fawlty Towers remains a comedy masterpiece, fun for all ages as the billboards used to say.

SHA NA NA, Carnegie Hall, June 1974

Like many others I had a weak spot for Sha Na Na, the tongue-in-cheek American golden oldies troupe that was a surprise hit at Woodstock. I first saw them at London’s Speakeasy in the summer of 1971, and at the Reading Festival the same week, and on that visit to the UK I interviewed them too, or tried to as they acted in character on and off stage. Keith Moon was a big fan, of course. Wearing a gold lame suit, Keith introduced them on stage that year at the Carnegie Hall in New York. He did the same thing at the Crystal Palace Bowl the following year, a show that was headlined by The Beach Boys. 

I was at a Sha Na show at the Carnegie Hall 50 years ago last weekend, and here’s what I wrote on Melody Maker’s Caught In The Act page. 

Sha Na Na were reviving rock and roll long before anyone else, and long before the current wave of nostalgia swept down on both sides of the Atlantic. Last week they played a couple of shows at Carnegie Hall, and despite the familiarity of their act they proved they are the best at this particular form of rock entertainment.

They were handicapped, though. Bowser, the tall skinny guy with the deep bass voice, was unable to appear apart from a walk-on part as a dance hall MC. For my money, he’s always been the star of Sha Na Na’s show, a singularly ugly young man blessed with a remarkable voice that blends naturally into what the group are trying to put over.

As a result, they were down to nine men, not a small complement for a rock band by any means, but they nevertheless sounded thinner than usual. Instrumentation was kept at a minimum and they relied totally on the harmony vocals to carry them along. Last month their guitarist, Vinnie Taylor, died but his replacement, Elliott Randall*, acquitted himself well within the limited range that guitaring for Sha Na Na offers.

Bearing in mind these setbacks, the band whipped up enormous excitement among the New Yorkers who were surprisingly young. I’d expected a Carnegie Hal full of greasers from the West Side but Sha Na Na’s fans seems to be mainly teenagers. There wasn’t a motor cycle to be seen on 57th Street, and the only leather jackets had buttons instead of zips. 

The show opened with the familiar Sha Na Na routines acting out the ’Fifties oldies that are now almost as synonymous with Sha Na Na as the versions by the original artists. Then they “hit the street”, changing clothes for another bunch of oldies. This time the stage props included trash cans, gas lamps and traffic lights.

This was followed by the dance contest, compared by the hitherto absent Bowser who received an enormous cheer as he walked on and explained that his doctor had prevented him from singing and dancing because he had a partially collapsed lung. He then intimated that he’d threatened his doctor with a chain, which resulted in his belated appearance this evening.

Three of the band picked partners from the audience for the contest which was played mainly for laughs. The winning girl’s prize was an opportunity to dance with fat horn player Lenny – “The Sensuous King Of Rock And Roll”.

The show closed with the back curtains pulled back to reveal a small orchestra – brass and strings – all dressed in their vests. Mostly they were drowned out by the vocals and yelling from the audience, and as usual the group paraded back for a total of four encores. A good evening’s fun. 

* Trivia note: Elliott Randall played the well-known guitar solo on Steely Dan’s ‘Reelin’ In the Years’. 

MY MAMA, CASS: A MEMOIR by Owen Elliot-Kugell

Shamefully, the death in London of ‘Mama’ Cass Elliot on July 29, 1974, made just a few short paragraphs on page five of the following week’s Melody Maker. She’d just completed a series of concerts at the Palladium near Oxford Circus, the opening night of which MM’s reviewer described as ‘dreadful… a totally depressing evening out’. The heart attack that felled her was misreported as ‘choking on a ham sandwich’, her manager’s idea of a more fitting end to a woman whose generous physique played a macabre role in her too short life.

All of which paints a rather gloomy picture of Cass Elliot but in the almost 50 years since her death she has achieved redemption, of sorts. It’s now acknowledged that Cass, Ellen Naomi Cohen to her family, possessed a fine vocal range and that without her The Mamas and The Papas, the quartet that catapulted her to fame in 1965, wouldn’t have been half as successful had not John Phillips invited her to join the group, albeit reluctantly in light of her appearance. Furthermore, she was a key social networker amongst the musicians that resided in the canyons of Los Angeles in the mid-sixties, instrumental in making introductions that resulted in significant partnerships, most notably John Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky who became The Lovin’ Spoonful, and bringing Graham Nash to the attention of David Crosby and Stephen Stills. 

Owen Elliot-Kugell is Cass Elliot’s daughter, an only child. Born in 1967, she last saw her mother leaving JFK airport for that fateful trip to the UK in 1974 and thereafter was raised by her aunt Leah, Cass’s younger sister, and her husband Russ Kunkel, whose CV as a session drummer reads like a list of inductees at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. On hand too as a sort of proxy mother throughout her early years and beyond was Michelle Phillips, now the only surviving member of the Ms&Ps, and it was Michelle who helped trace her father, a bass player called Chuck Day, whose identity was a mystery until the 1980s.

Elliot-Kugell has written an affectionate memoir that does its best to further that redemption but try as she might it’s hard to shake off the feeling that her mother’s greatest moments were with the group she left behind. Albums released before and after the group somehow failed to sell in any appreciable quantity, which Elliot-Kugell invariably blames on ‘poor promotion and marketing’ and there’s a general feeling that Cass never really reached her potential. There were ill-advised career moves, a disastrous appearance in Las Vegas and poor health, attributed to efforts to lose weight, was an issue that never went away. When Cass died she was broke and though her debts were eventually paid off, it wasn’t until the CD era that her estate became solvent.  

It’s a sad story. The first half of the book offers up plenty of family background, followed by the rise and fall of the Ms&Ps and Cass’s subsequent solo career, the information gathered largely from Elliot-Kugell’s talks with many of those who knew and admired her mother. The second half dwells on the author’s childhood and life thereafter, which has had its ups and downs. Included are details of her friendship with the children of other LA musicians, among them Carnie and Wendy, daughters of Brian Wilson, and Chynna, daughter of Michelle and John Phillips, who formed the successful ’90s trio Wilson Phillips. Elliot-Kugell, a singer herself, was unfortunate not to have joined them. She also lays to rest the canard about the ham sandwich – the story was concocted by Cass’s manager to allay speculation that hers was another death from a drug overdose, and in 2000 Elliot-Kugell actually met the journalist who first reported it. “It had been for the protection of my mother’s name and legacy,” she writes. 

Like other children of musicians who’ve passed Elliot-Kugell has found herself accepting awards on behalf of her mother. She was there alongside John, Denny and Michelle when the Ms&Ps were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, and in the eight-page photo section there’s a picture of her alongside John Sebastian, Stephen Stills and Michelle when her mum’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star was unveiled in 2022. The book has 262 pages, is set in rather large type and lacks an index. 

        Finally, excuse me while I have a rant. 

        As those familiar with Just Backdated may know, in 2017, through a literary agent, I tried to get a publishing deal for a memoir by Amanda De Wolf, the daughter of Keith Moon, that would have been co-written by myself. It didn’t happen. I was told by numerous publishers that because Mandy last saw her father in 1975 (when she was 12), she ‘didn't know him well enough’ or ‘didn’t spend enough time with him’ to write a book that was substantial enough for publication. In the end I gave up but two years later, with Mandy’s permission, I posted my proposal for the book on this blog*. It has now had 36.6k hits, the second highest number of hits of all the 1,000+ posts on Just Backdated. Many of those who read it, among them no doubt Who fans galore, expressed amazement that the book was never published, which suggests there was a market for it. 

        Owen Elliot-Kugell last saw her mother Cass Elliot when she was seven, and was unaware of the identity of her father until she was 19. With respect to Elliot-Kugell, for all sorts of reasons Keith Moon was far more celebrated than her mother and Mandy’s story, which as well as featuring a father who was rock’s craziest hedonist, involved her overcoming alcoholism, two divorces and a degree of angst with regard to the behaviour Ian McLagan, her mother’s second husband. To my mind, it was at least as worthy of publication as this book. 

        All of the above is not meant as a criticism of My Mama, Cass, merely an observation about the quirks of the publishing world, of which I was once a part. And although it’s unmentioned, there is a morbid Keith Moon connection: the Mayfair apartment where Cass Elliot died in 1974 was the same one where Keith would die four years later. Rant over. 

*https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2019/09/moon-girl-my-life-in-shadow-of-rocks.html. For personal reasons, Mandy no longer wishes to pursue the book. 

BACK TO BLACK

After her passing, the most regrettable aspect of Amy Winehouse’s life and career is the paucity of recorded material she left behind. All we have to savour are two studio albums, Frank and Back To Black, and a Hidden Treasures CD that collects most of the odds and sods. All three are alongside me as I type this and, counting up, there are but 38 tracks in total. I wish there was more. 

        That the world lost an enormous talent when Amy overdid the vodka in July, 2011, is made abundantly clear in Back To Black, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s sympathetic biopic, titled after her Grammy winning second LP which has been cited as the most important pop record of the century thus far. In terms of grit, taking control and revealing personal issues in song, it’s magnificent and I wonder whether we’d have had an Adele or Taylor Swift without it. 

        I watched the movie last night in the luxurious Light Cinema at Addlestone. Somehow, the Light’s huge, comfortable seats, spaced well apart, and first-class lounge ambience add an extra star to any movie and this one, unfairly disparaged as pedestrian by many critics in my opinion, deserves four or five, not least for the bravura performance of Marisa Abela as the doomed singer, secure in her own talent yet crossed in love by the roguish Blake Fielder-Civil, played by Jack O’Connell, who leads her into temptation. It’s a tragedy, of course, albeit it one enlivened by fabulous music scenes that lead to a scenario that we know in advance will end in tears.

        The film opens warmly, with Amy as a budding star in a family singsong, its purpose to impose the belief that music runs in her veins, inherited from her practical, taxi-driving dad Mitch, played by Eddie Marsan, and her vivacious, supportive nan Cynthia, to whom she is especially close and who once sang professionally, played by Lesley Manville. The song Amy sings, in which she is joined by her dad, is ‘Fly Me To The Moon’, most famously recorded by Frank Sinatra but also by Tony Bennett, and it serves to stress how music from the swing era, not rock or even soul, informs Amy’s musical background and imagination. 

        Thereafter the film closely follows the trajectory of Amy’s career. We see her composing with a guitar on her bed, her boyfriend sending a rough demo of her songs to a prospective manager who interests Island Records and the recording and release of Frank, her moderately successful debut album. It comes as no surprise that Amy is on the lippy side, displeased when advisers suggest she stop playing guitar on stage and concentrate on her singing and bristling, too, at being managed by the same company that handles The Spice Girls, for whom she harbours a haughty disdain. Such is her frustration at a meeting to address these issues that she walks out and heads for the pub where, in what is by far the film’s most riveting scene, she meets Blake whose courtship dance rivals that of those exotic birds we see angling to mate in David Attenborough’s wildlife programmes. 

        On the positive side, Blake introduces Amy to The Shangri-Las, thus influencing her beehive hairstyle, lovingly created by nan Cynthia, but he’s also responsible for leading her astray which in turn explains the three year delay between Frank and Back To Black. This is largely due to Amy’s mind being elsewhere during their pub crawling and drug abuse, and here we see them cavorting in some familiar locations, Ronnie Scott’s in Soho and Camden’s Dublin Castle and Good Mixer among them. It’s a troubled relationship, with Blake more inclined to walk than Amy, and when he tells her he wants to return to his former girlfriend she’s heartbroken, pouring her sorrow into the songs that became Back In Black. The death from cancer of her beloved nan only adds to her melancholy.  

        When the record’s a hit Blake returns. The idea that he’s after her money, as suggested by an odious friend, is dismissed and although things are still a bit rocky, they marry in Florida, much to Mitch’s disapproval. Soon after Blake is imprisoned for assault but while he’s inside he cleans up his act and opts to end it with Amy who’s broken hearted for a second time. With pressure mounting on her to concentrate on her career and the paparazzi on her heels, dad Mitch persuades her to go into rehab but no sooner is she off the booze than she buys that lovely house in Camden Square where she succumbs to the vodka bottle, this time with fatal results. We are left to assume it was all a terrible accident. 

        As Amy, Marisa Abela is in every scene, never off the screen, whether she is singing on stage or in the studio, and her impersonation of Amy’s vocals are uncanny. She captures Amy’s slightly hesitant stage mannerisms to perfection and also looks, wears make-up and dresses like her. Most of the songs we associate with Amy are included in the soundtrack though unless I missed it I never heard ‘Love Is A Losing Game’ which is surprising considering how the relationship with Blake takes centre stage. Perhaps more importantly, she offers us a side of Amy Winehouse for which I was unprepared: a London girl who sang so well it overwhelmed her yet more than anything wanted simply to find a boy who loved her and would give her a family of her own, just like the one we saw in that opening scene.   

        Recommended.